


the struggle with Boys who pine after Girls who pine after Books

by pennuendos



Category: not actually a fandom haha
Genre: Gen, ramble?, short story?, thing??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2018-02-10 14:32:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2028606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennuendos/pseuds/pennuendos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>actually not a fanfic at all? just needed to write something? sorry?</p>
            </blockquote>





	the struggle with Boys who pine after Girls who pine after Books

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry I just needed to post something I guess? If you do end up reading it (which you shOULDNT, IT'S AWFUL) you'll notice there is a very big problem with tense, and I am aware of it, and only care a smidgeon.

she'll notice you.

you don't think she does, really, she's hardly ever around you, maybe hasn't even spoken a single word to you, but she will, her barely-there circle of friends say, she does, because sometimes she'll be reading a book and she'll look up, _look up_ , at you, they say, and they say it like it's the highest compliment anyone could ever hope of receiving.

and then one day you'll go in, hands shaking, to the one-floor Barnes & Noble on 4th, the one by her house, and you'll order yourself a small cup of coffee at the little Starbucks inside and fumble with the change, and walk over to the little round table she's sitting at alone, reading, always reading, step towards her, step back, step towards her again, tap her on the shoulder, face bright red, and ask her if you can sit down with her.

she'll nod her head a little, just a tiny affirmation, but you'll be watching her so closely you'll notice (and she'll smile at that, smile into her book, where you can't see her smile), and you'll clear your throat and pull the seat from the table next to you over to where she is, and just observe her while she reads, because she's beautiful when she reads, nose scrunched up in concentration, eyes shining and large with anticipation and excitement, darting from one side of the page to the other as fast as they will go, eyebrows drawing together anxiously during sad bits, one side of her mouth going up before the other during the quirky one-liners, and her lip turning white where she bites it to keep herself from crying over a beloved character's too-soon demise.

and as the little cup of coffee sits cold and forgotten on the table, you muster up your courage, and before your internal voice of reason can make an appearance, you gather your rapidly beating heart in your hand, and ask her about the title she's reading.

really, you should have done it sooner, just for that look on her face, because she's smiling so hard you feel like every lightbulb in the world must be bright-hot and glowing, like a million suns, a million streetlamps, and looking up at you through wispy eyelashes, and as she spins excitedly into her tale of faraway places and too-close-to-home characters, you can't help but wonder if she'd been waiting for you to ask her that question all day, all week, all her life, and why ever in all the world you'd been too nervous (scared? worried?) to do it earlier.

a friend of hers drives by to collect her an hour later, and she's scribbled her phone number onto the cover page of the book she'd raved about, the book nestled under your arm as you walk through the rain back to your house, the biggest smile on your face that there's been in a long, long time, and as you climb into bed, hair sopping wet, mind giddy with a promise of a Tuesday, you will the day to start over again in the morning, and never stop replaying itself.

it becomes a thing after that, you meet her the next Tuesday and the Tuesday after that, and every time you go you buy the two of you cups of coffee you won't drink, and she lends you a new book, and you can't keep up with her but you damn well try, because you love the spark that lights up her eyes when you stumble upon a meaning-sated line, or a particularly vivid sample of imagery or characterization, and she picks great books, she really does, full of relatable characters and sky-scraping climaxes, complete with plot twists that make you want to pull your hair out and the kind of quotes you want to tattoo all over yourself and keep them close to you forever, and you fall just a little bit further into her brilliance because of it.

one particular Tuesday she'll be sick and forget to call you, and you'll rush up to the barista behind the counter and ask of her two small coffees, and make one of them a mocha because that's the kind she actually drinks sometimes instead of excusing herself to the bathroom to dump the contents of the cup down the sink, and you'll turn around excitedly with two cups in one hand and the book clutched to your chest, ready to discuss, and you'll see that she isn't there and your stomach will plummet down, down, down and you'll forget how to breathe momentarily and you'll wonder when precisely she began to mean so damn much to you, and all you can say to express this awful throbbing whirlwind of emotions you're feeling is this tiny, pathetic little _'oh,'_ , and you'll throw both cups of coffee a little too hard into the trash, and when you get home, after two or three hours of watching crappy HBO-original reruns, Tuesday's book lying depressingly open and alone on the counter, you'll finally start to realize that the moment she began to mean so damn much to you was the moment she looked up at you from her book the first day.

the one good thing that comes out of this Tuesday (you'll start referring to it in your head as _the-Tuesday-of-HBO-and-sad-violin-music-playing-in-the-background_ ) is that she remembers that she has a phone, and that you have one too, and that maybe it would be convenient for both of them if she could use it sometimes to contact you, which she does, and she texts the way she speaks, with capitalization and emphasis and punctuation and _significance_ , ~~and she'll send you pictures of her cat sometimes too~~ , and it makes you happy every time she texts, because it means she's acknowledging your existence, like she really cares about how you're doing, and maybe it's not such a bad thing to be cared about by a really smart, really pretty girl ~~who is not your mom~~.

on another Tuesday, after she leaves, you'll spend thirty dollars on one of the fancy calligraphy pen sets in the front of the store, and another twelve on a thesaurus, and spend the rest of the week trying to adequately describe how she makes you feel, which you'll soon discover there aren't enough words for, or the right words for anyways, but your finished product is basically thesaurus vomit and even kind of resembles the shitty poetry in the throwaway romance novels she hates, and you'll bring it to her the next time you see her and she'll even smile a little, and you'll make it a point to bring her a little snippet of poetry every time you see her, if she'll show you a little more of her lopsided smile every time you show it to her.

a few Tuesdays later, you'll pull it together enough to grab her by the wrist before she leaves the table and ask her out to dinner, and she'll sort of flinch in this weird, surprised way, like no one's ever asked her that before, a goddamn shame, and say 'alright,' and you'll run to your house and pull out the beat-up pickup truck and take her out to Macaroni Grill a half mile away, and you'll get Pepsi to signal her it's okay to get whatever she wants, and she'll just get a water and a salad and eat some of the bread and olive oil they leave on the table for you, which sucks because you didn't really want a Pepsi, anyway, and she'll doodle absentmindedly on the paper tablecloth and not look up until the waitress comes around to pick up the tab.

about an hour after you drop her off at her place, you'll call her friends and ask them if she's okay, and they'll say she's sad because some guy called Jace Lightwood was possessed, and it'll only hit you as you're going to sleep that the mysterious Jace person is probably a book character.

at two in the morning on Sunday she'll be at your place crying because someone named Gus is dead and there'll be lots of tissues and awkward pats on the back and a lot- a _lot_ \- of mascara, but she'll have gone from a mumbling, inconsolable mess to just really hopeless looking by four, and before she leaves she'll kiss you on the check quickly, and you'll be sort of startled that she didn't have to stand on her tiptoes at all.

on the Tuesday after the Gus incident, you won't buy her a coffee because she'll already be nursing a hot chocolate by the time you get there, and she'll be so absorbed in her book that she won't even notice you moving to scoot your chair closer to hers, and so you'll stroke her hair a little and sip your coffee at random intervals, it will dawn on you that the Starbucks coffee is actually pretty awful, and you'll leave after about a half an hour; she won't even notice you leaving.

when Thursday rolls around, her friends will text you to invite you to her apartment for a bad scary movie marathon, and you'll accept without wondering why she didn't invite you herself.

that Friday night you'll park the worn-out blue Chevy pickup outside of her complex, ring the doorbell and she'll let you inside, and as the trailers start and her friends are anxiously awaiting the popcorn cooking in the microwave, she'll pull you aside into her room and ask you if the two of you are dating, and you'll say 'if you want to be' or something stupid and cliché like that, and the two of you will sit on the bed for a while in silence, fingers interlocked, before going to rejoin her friends in the living room, and it won't even occur to you that none of the books she's shown to you on one of your Tuesdays was showcased on the shelf in her bedroom.

the next Tuesday she'll bring you The Book Thief, and you'll love it so much you'll read it twice, and she'll get so animated talking about it on video chat a day later, using hand gestures and speaking loudly and eyes sparkling, that you forget you ever thought there was something off about her at all.

when you visit Barnes & Noble the next week, as it's closing down for the night, you'll hold her hand and curl into her side and whisper, like sharing a big secret, _'the coffee here is actually sort of terrible,'_ and she'll giggle a little and nod a lot, and you'll take her to yours and pull out the truck and drive her to this quaint barely off-campus café you used to go to, with decent coffee, decent food, and decent live music, and you'll share a mildly-burnt grilled cheese, and on the way to her apartment you'll roll down the window for her so she can stick her head out, letting her pretty hair cascade in ribbons down her back and away into the wind, and at traffic lights you'll sneak looks at her, radiant and alive.

you call her that Friday and ask her if she'd like to go see a movie, and she'll say yes, and you pick her up and whisk her to the nearest theater to see the latest installment of the Hobbit (you're pretty sure that was a book), and when you're rethinking that decision during the movie, when she's intently focused on the movie and you're thinking any half-dashed hopes of getting some theater seat movie action have been cut down to zero, spiders begin to fill the screen, and she'll bury her face in your sweater and make little whimpering noises, and you'll hold her close to your neck and think it was the best decision you've made in a pretty long time.

on the next Tuesday, in the morning, when you're hastily brushing your teeth and scrambling to put your jeans on, it'll suddenly hit you, like a marvelous epiphany: you haven't kissed her yet.

when you get to the bookstore you're anxious, anxious, anxious, like the first time you came in here to see her and dropped two quarters and a penny on the ground, your hand was shaking so hard, and so you fiddle with your hoodie and the hem of your jeans and talk a little bit too quickly, and soon it's over, and you'll try really hard to not just physically pull her into the car.

when you _finally_ get into the Chevy, you just look at her for a while, hoping she'll pick up on what you're thinking, just pause and appreciate the smatter of freckles that dusted her nose, the steep incline of her philtrum, and you reach your quivering hand out to brush a stray lock of hair behind her ear, look at her eyes, her lips, her eyes, her lips.

she leans forward.

puts her hand behind your neck.

and kisses you.

and yeah, her lips are chapped, but her mouth is soft and warm and sort of nice, and you get the feeling you could probably just lazily kiss her for hours on end without even having to stop, maybe even right here in this parking lot, and she's breathing onto you now, and it's a little bit heavy and weird, but her mouth is alright, so you focus on that, but suddenly you taste salt in your mouth and pull away and notice she's crying.

she's crying softly, and you reach out to touch her, put your hand on her cheek or something to reassure her, and she sniffles, so you pull away, and the only think you can think is 'Am I that bad a kisser?'

she starts to cry harder, but shakes her head and wipes the tears from her eyes.

"what was that like, for you?"

the first word that comes to mind is 'warm,' so you tell her, and she makes this awful, ragged, half-laugh half-sob sort of sound, and blinks a few times to get rid of the tears welling up in her eyes again.

"not anything like fire, right? or electricity?"

you say no before you can stop yourself.

she's silent for a moment.

"nothing like air, either, like a big lungful of fresh air after being down underwater for a couple of seconds too long?"

You don't know what she's getting at. You don't know if she's getting at anything. You shake your head.

"and definitely not like water, like you've been stranded in a hot, dry desert for a million years, and your lips are so chapped they're almost stuck together, and there's this gaping hole in your stomach where there should be water, but there is no water, and you're parched and quenched and just plain goddamn _thirsty,_ and suddenly you stumble upon an oasis full of fresh, clean, ice-cold _water_ and you just flat-out run to it even though your legs are quivering from exhaustion and you're tired as all hell, and you lap it up with everything in you and gather it in your cupped hands and pour it all down your body and drink as much as you possibly can?"

you stay silent.

she sounds bewildered when she says, "so it was just like _kissing,_ huh?"

neither of us make any noise, or move at all.

she mutters 'kissing' harshly under her breath one more time, like it's the most vile, disgusting word she knows how to say.

she turns to me, smiles a little wistfully, a little sadly, tears beginning to bloom up in her eyes again, clutches my hair and kisses me _hard_ , and when I taste salt, I know it's from the blood in my mouth as she kisses me with her tongue, with her teeth, with everything she has.

then she loosens her grip on my hair, pops open the worm-down blue door, and walks away into the warm June night.


End file.
